10 Ways to Make the Sales Team Love Your Product
Is your B2B product easy to sell and easy to renew?
My relationship with sales is one that has been the source of greatest strength and greatest friction in my career. More than once I’ve reminded myself that sales people deserve empathy too. I realize not every product person has to navigate sales stakeholders. But if you’re working on a B2B product with a sales force, odds are you know what I mean.
I try to help product and sales teams succeed under the mantra “Easy to Sell, Easy to Renew.” It’s a principle that aligns the interests of product, sales and customers around value, simplicity, and competitive advantage.
I’ve worked with thousands of sales people throughout my career in Product. Yet most of the product community’s dialogue centers around the relationship with product and engineering. I’ve struggled to find many examples detailing how to bond product and sales teams (Antonia Bozhkova offers a good perspective). I’ve learned first-hand many of the product mistakes I highlight below. This is my attempt to fill that information void for product teams working on B2B products and the B2B sales leaders that want to love them.
Just as Product enables Engineering to be successful with prioritization focus, line of sight to future, quality specs and usable design, Product’s job is also to enable Sales to succeed.
I never assume I know all the answers. So I spoke with some of the best sales leaders I’ve known and some amazing product leaders to get their insights.
Take action today:
First, finish reading this story. Second, ask your sales and product team to score how well your product meets the success criteria using this “Easy to Sell, Easy to Renew” worksheet. Your teams will realign and strengthen their partnership as they see the product through each other’s eyes.
- Where do your teams agree on low scores?
- Where do they disagree?
- Praise the teams for the attributes they both score highly.
This exercise and the decisions you make to remedy any problems will help your teams, customers and company become more successful.
Easy to Sell
“What makes a product easy to sell?”
1. It’s easy to identify buyers and users with a recurring need. Know the target customer and the problems they’re working to solve. How do they solve these problems now? Product and sales teams should be able to identify buyers and users by title, likely budget/time spent solving their problem, and which methods they’re using, by product or process.
2. Our solution uniquely solves the problem. The fewer competitors offering solutions, the better. Have a credible, compelling value proposition that separates you from your client’s alternatives. Need help with your value proposition? Work with product marketing to craft and validate. Doing it all yourself? Check out Product Plan’s advice on how to write a compelling value proposition.
3. It’s easy to quantify the ROI of our solution. Can you prove and measure how you’ve benefitted your customer? Companies buy solutions they believe will drive incremental revenue, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, or improve employee productivity. Determine which benefit is most changed by your product. How do you make it obvious to clients, client support, sales and product teams? Make ROI impact obvious and credible helps your sales team secure the “yes.” Two ways to do this: 1) A trial where a client can prove it to themselves and their budget-holding decision makers. 2) Referenceable customer case studies with details on their need, the solution and the ROI impact they experienced.
4. Pricing is simple and fair. Understand your clients’ budget allocations to solve their problem without your solution. Create short feedback loops with sales when you test pricing in the market. Complicated pricing slows down sales teams and confuses buyers. Puja Rios, Sales Director at CareerBuilder, said “We met weekly with our product team to share feedback on pricing a new product bundle. We began with 3 scenarios but discovered situations where clients needed more flexibility. It was a true partnership to make adjustments quickly so we could scale.” Need pricing plan inspiration? Refer to this analysis of 100 B2B SaaS Pricing pages.
5. Easy to adopt. 82% of B2B SaaS products offer a free trial option. If you need to involve a solution engineer to figure out how feasible it is for your client to use your solution, chances are your product is hard to adopt. “Even if you have a client that believes in your value proposition and ROI potential, if it’s difficult to switch to or trial your solution, it’s a deal breaker,” said Camilla Velasquez, VP of Product and Marketing at Justworks.
Where does the friction between product and sales come into prospective client discussions? Duh, it’s when the opposite of the above is true:
a. No identifiable need in market or solution doesn’t match market need. This happens when testing a product against a new customer segment. It happens when B2B products try to sell their solutions as a platform that solves for many use cases. “It’s hard to sell a swiss-army knife to someone who’s only trying to carve a turkey,” said Gideon Ansell, Senior Director, Experience Design at Quick Base.
b. Too many competitors with same not-so-unique value proposition
c. Unclear whether the ROI will be there for customer
d. Complex or unjustified pricing with little flexibility for sales to adjust
e. Too risky or too much effort to trial
“[At a previous employer] we made a product too difficult for our client to use. We ended up in a situation where the client had to outsource use of the solution back to us,” said Andrea Wagner, VP of Enterprise Sales at Shiftgig. Not exactly a confidence boost. Sales reps can smell difficult to sell products. They won’t waste their valuable time trying to sell their way around suboptimal product decisions.
Easy to Renew
“What makes a product easy to renew?” Artem Kroupenev, VP of Product at Augury, shared his magic product formula: “Usage + NPS + ROI = Renewals.”
- Easy to use. B2B products without users and usage are notoriously difficult to renew. There are two likely culprits:
a) Sold in a bundle without a real need. If you incent your sales teams to sell certain products, they’ll seek to bundle them in contracts, obscuring how many customers truly demand your product. If you’re monitoring usage for these bundled customers, you’ll see your adoption curve plummet unless your customer support team can win them over.
b) Too difficult to adopt. Whether sales misunderstood the client’s use case, couldn’t convince influencers to roll-out the new solution, or a product’s poor UI derailed initial users, you’ve got a problem. When this happens, sales and product teams need to jointly understand the root causes behind the lack of adoption. This shared understanding will help both teams adjust sales approach, onboarding support, or the product’s UI.
Sales, customer support and product teams should all be monitoring usage intently during the early days of a customer’s contract. “When products aren’t easily operationalized in a client org, sales reps and the client find themselves dealing with issues they hadn’t expected to spend time on,” said Cecil Puvathingal, Director of Sales Development at Upwork. Product and sales teams can prevent low usage scenarios by creating charter or beta client programs for new products.
Joy Tagert, Head of Sales at brightwheel, described another “one-time hit” scenario this way: “When a product has great vision but poor adoption, it begs the question whether enough due diligence was done around probability of clients ability to operationalize the product before we committed to build, ship and sell.”
Enterprise clients = complex org structures and processes. Enabling product, sales and customer support to discover and address implementation risks prior to scaling is critical to minimize churn when your product is in market.
2. Sticky among users. When your clients start using your product, is it immediately clear to them that they’re better off? Is the product intuitive? Does it save them time or money? Do they feel smarter because they chose to use your product instead of your competitors? You’re getting sticky when your product is well designed, provides an impact and makes the user feel delighted. “When our product is part of our clients’ technicians’ toolkit, they can’t imagine operating without it,” Kroupenev noted. This is the true test of product-market fit: would your client resist if you took your product away?
3. Clear success criteria at outset. As product people, this is the most important input: the desired outcome (the ROI). It lights our fire within. Defined outcomes allow client support and product teams to calibrate throughout the contract term to course-correct, if necessary. In practice, this is what it looks like:
a. The client’s decision-maker and your sales rep agree on achievable ROI metrics in a reasonable timeframe that would justify a renewal.
b. Your sales rep sets achievable expectations and ensures the client’s commitment to deploy the solution to achieve those desired results.
c. The success criteria are captured in salesforce (or whatever system) to provide transparency within your organization.
d. The client support, sales and product teams have the data to measure progress towards this desired outcome during the term to secure the renewal.
The product lead measures and records ROI for the charter clients to understand the range of possible outcomes. You’ll use this data to set ROI expectations with sales and prospective clients. You are at risk if you rely solely on clients to understand ROI data. If you can’t measure ROI impact directly, you will need proxy metrics that product, sales and customer support teams can monitor to predict client value.
4. Deliver expected (or better!) ROI. Product and sales teams support each other when they share ownership for customers achieving ROI goals. You need the expectation AND the ROI impact. Gina D’Andrea, former CRO at Bankrate and SVP Sales & Brand Partnerships at What to Expect, secures renewals this way: “We sold what they needed. It worked. We agreed on a definition of success, and we could prove it.” Without this clarity, clients are unlikely to renew.
5. High switching costs. Although we want our solutions to be easy to adopt, we help our sales teams renew when the solutions create high switching costs. There are customer-friendly and unfriendly ways to create switching costs. But when a product has been widely adopted, is creating significant value, is easy to use, and has a lot of client data embedded in the system, it has a high switching cost. Many clients won’t be quick to risk all they have invested to maximize ROI with your product for an unproven competitor.
When are products not easy to renew? My interviewees shared their top culprits:
a. One time hits. Sold on a vision or for a one-time need instead of recurring need for client or no agreed upon expectation for what would lead to a renewal. We had a few products like this at CareerBuilder where we helped employers with their Employment Branding or video production to tell their stories to prospective candidates. Great products that delivered real value but had a low renewal probability. Sales reps did not want this revenue included in their base quota only to have to find replacement revenue in the next year.
b. Questionable ROI. It’s difficult to know whether the client is likely to renew if the successful outcome isn’t discussed or captured at the time of sale. If a sales rep inherits such an account, Brian Niles, Regional Sales Leader at LinkedIn, encourages product and sales teams to objectively evaluate whether the client is better off with the product than they were before. This dialogue may help secure the renewal and set more measurable expectations for the renewal term.
c. Poor usability. Some product teams add features and usability worsens. Others never had UX rigor in the product development. Brandon Anderson, Senior Director of Product at SportsEngine, highlighted the cost of this tradeoff to an org. “We started out with point solutions developed as projects, which was brutal on the UX as developers made the UI calls. Sales reps wasted their valuable time training users instead of selling. One of the hardest lines I walk is keeping the company focused and committed to improving usability and value for current customers. People can be easily distracted by shiny new objects.”
There you have it. 100+ years of B2B sales and product experience in a 10 minute read. That’s a great ROI.
Now get going on that worksheet.
I know what you’re thinking. But Hope, you didn’t specifically discuss NPS! Here’s why. In my experience, asking B2B clients a simple NPS question “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend us (our company/product) to a friend, partner or colleague?” generates a lot of confusing trend data. At CareerBuilder, we used NPS surveys but when we read the Why? feedback, we saw the following:
- some respondents were buyers, not users
- some users hadn’t yet used the product
- some didn’t know the product was in their contract (see bundling risk above)
- some respondents were approaching renewal and were reluctant to give feedback for fear of losing negotiation leverage
- some had just had a change in sales rep and were pained by having to educate another person on their business/processes
- etc.
We would try to time NPS surveys mid-contract or 90-days prior to renewal and distinguish between whether they would recommend the product vs sales rep. The reality is, as a product leader, you learn far more when your product teams spend time with users, get feedback in context, and obsess over use cases and the data on usage and ROI. See recommendations above.
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Did we miss a critical ingredient in the recipe for B2B product and sales success? Leave a response below.
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Hope Gurion, founder of Fearless Product, is a Product / Business coach for technology companies. Follow me to get more product leadership advice. Share your thoughts in comments below or connect with me on LinkedIn or via email.
Thank you to the following experts who contributed so generously to this story:
Sales Leaders:
Cecil Puvathingal, Director of Sales Development at Upwork
Gina D’Andrea, SVP Sales and Brand Partnerships at What to Expect
Brian Niles, Regional Sales Leader at LinkedIn
Puja (Bhola) Rios, Director of Sales, CareerBuilder
Andrea Wagner Giagkou, VP of Enterprise Sales, Shiftgig
Joy Tagert, Head of Sales, brightwheel; former SVP Sales, OpenTable
Product Leaders:
Brandon Anderson, Senior Director of Product, Sports Engine
Artem Kroupenev, VP of Product, Augury
Camilla Velasquez, VP of Product and Marketing, Justworks
Matthew Strozak, VP of Product Management, PowerReviews
Gideon Ansell, Senior Director Experience Design, Quick Base
